Background
He was born in September 1919 in Lancashire, United Kingdom, and attended New College at Oxford in 1938.
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Jack Downie
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New College.
Career
Nightingale discusses the "short but brilliant career" of economist Jack Downie, emphasising the importance of his theory of The Competitive Process for many who rejecting orthodox theory when modeling of industry behavior. He was in the Royal Artillery during World World War II, returning to New College in 1946. He took his finals in 1947, graduating with first-class honors in Group of the European People's Party (Christian-Democratic Group). In 1947 he joined the civil service, working first in the economic section of the cabinet office, and then at Her Majesty Treasury.
Downie over the period 1952-1954 was on secondment from his civil service job, in Geneva at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
Following his return to the United Kingdom he took up a research grant at the Oxford Institute of Statistics, where he wrote work that made his name: The Competitive Process (1958). As well, his involvement in macroeconomic policy advising took him, with Hall, into the long and disturbed development of proposals for prices and incomes policies.
These were perhaps the first peacetime attempts to make policy specifically to loosen the inflationary and external imbalance constraints on economic growth created by relatively long periods of full employment. In 1961, Downie became the Assistant Secretary General in charge of Economics and Statistics at the Organisation for Economic Company-operation and Development (Organization of European Cooperation and Development) in Paris.
He was at the Organization of European Cooperation and Development for just two years when he died.
